extraterrstrial life

At first I thought this was a story about casting the next Doctor.

We haven't ruled out that this is somehow related to the Doctor Who 50th anniversary, but the United Kingdom is stepping up their efforts to search for intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe with the United Kingdom Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence. (UKSETI)

The results of a three-month long directed search of a small patch of sky by researchers at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) are officially in, and they are disappointing. Well, disappointing for anyone who was hoping they would come back showing some glimmer of intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy. If you're particularly worried about alien invasions, though, you can sleep peacefully for at least one more night, as a close survey of 86 stars turned up none of the signals indicative of life that the SETI scientists were looking for.Read More

Earlier this year, a team of Russian-led engineers and researchers drilled a hole into the Earth, breaking into Lake Vostok, a liquid water lake sealed beneath the ice of Antarctica for nearly 15 million years. They were looking for signs of life in the lake -- microbes that might offer clues to what sort of creatures we could expect to run into on icy moons elsewhere in the solar system, like Saturn's satellite Europa. This week, the first analyses of water samples from the lake are in, and they're pretty disheartening. Lake Vostok appears to be devoid of microbial life.
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